Full Service

Notes from the Rearview Mirror

About this Book:

Photographer David Hill traveled the main streets and back roads of Maine to photograph beautiful and largely forgotten cars from the "golden age" of America's love affair with the automobile. Beautiful, to Hill, doesn't necessarily mean fresh paint and polished chrome. It means cars and trucks with stories to tell and histories to share. How did they wind up forgotten and neglected? Complete with gorgeous photography and personal essays, Full Service chronicles Hill's journey back to the past, to give these worn and weathered pieces of Americana a chance to be seen and remembered.

"Full Service: Notes from the Rearview Mirror is a beautiful book . . . Mr. Hill lets his cameras convince us of the form over function beauty of these cars quietly passing the days while slowly returning to the ground . . . A perfect book for the classic automobile lover in the family."––James Fisher, The Miramichi Reader

"From Fryeburg to Saco, Lewiston to Wiscasset, Hill's book is a celebration of automobiles shown through his travels in the more southern parts of the state." ––Sarah Walker Caron, The Bangor Daily News

South Portlander David Hill, like me, is a news shooter. He’s a camera man at Portland television station WGME, CBS 13. When he’s not running and gunning after the biggest story of the day, Hill likes to traipse through the woods, and troll through Maine’s back roads, looking for old cars to photograph.

“This, for me, this is on my own time,” said Hill, leaning against a derelict car in the woods he first found while working a murder story. “I don’t have a deadline. I can take my time. I can sit out here in the woods for an hour, hour-and-a-half — talk to the car if I want to, it it won’t answer me but I can talk to it — and just be part of something that I’m not rushed to do.”

by Katy Kelleher, Contributing Editor, Islandport Press

Although he didn’t know it at the time, David Hill began researching his book, Full Servicewhen he was just eight years old. That was the age he received two gifts—a model of a 1955 Chevy Bel Air and a Kodak camera.

Hill, who works as a photojournalist at a Portland television station, has since graduated to bigger and better cameras, but he still remembers that first Kodak fondly. It sparked a lifelong interest in creating visually compelling photographs—images that can be enjoyed on their own as works of fine art or together as pieces that tell a greater story.

David Hill has been a television photojournalist for more than 20 years, winning many awards from the National Press Photographers Association, Maine Association of Broadcasters, The Associated Press, RTNDA and the US